Fresh Links!

With a Hello Kitty retrospective coming up at the Japanese American National Museum, a Hello Kitty scholar has stomped all over the dreams of kawaii-eyed youth by revealing hat Hello Kitty is not a cat: “She is a little girl. She is a friend. But she is not a cat.” In sum, Hello Kitty and Garfield belong to two different cartoon genome pools. [Culture: High & Low]

Russell Page’s garden at the Frick is being demolished to make way for the upcoming expansion. The Frick claims that the garden, once hailed by the New York Times as one of Page’s “most important works,” was never meant to be permanent. As a 1977 press release shows, though, this is a flat out lie. Who knew the Frick could be so controversial. [The Huffington Post]

If several thousand dollar easter egg hunts disguised as art are your kind of thing: ArtistMichael Sailstorferburies gold bars at the Folkstone triennial at high tide and waits patiently for low tide. At that point finders will be keepers. From a statement to the Guardian by Triennial curator Lewis Biggs: “I think we might well have a lot of people.” [The Guardian]

Adrian Searle has the review of the Folkstone Triennial. There’s a discussion of the Sailstorfer piece, a round-up of works Searle liked, and some complaints about Yoko Ono and Andy Goldsworthy. Meh. [The Guardian]

Ben Lerner’s new novel, 10:04, gets a thumbs up in the New Republic, and I can tell why. This narrator in the novel writes 10:04 as you’re reading it, and there’s scenes that blend non-fiction and sci-fi nearly seamlessly, like one where the protagonist starts having visions while walking along the High Line after eating a plate of hallucinogenic octopus. [New Republic]

Some notes on gigantic rabbit breeds: the now-extinct Minorcan King of Rabbits, due to its weight, was unable to hop. [Modern Farmer]

Hissbitch published “5 worst net artists” for Christmas last year, and at the time, blogger Tom Moody predicted the post would be deleted, just as their “10 worst net artist” post. We ran across Moody’s post again yesterday, and as predicted the Hissbitch post was deleted. So too is Hissbitch, which now seems to be taken over by Chinese characters. [Tom Moody]

Glenn Ligon in association with MZ Wallace has created a tote bag to benefit the Studio Museum in Harlem. [MZ Wallace]

Season seven of ART21 will showcase a topic that’s been close to us on the blog. For the show’s debut episode, they followed Thomas Hirschhorn around to discuss the Gramsci Monument at Forest Houses, described as “a new kind of monument that, while physically ephemeral, lives on in collective memory.” That episode premieres Friday, October 24 at 10:00 p.m. ET. [ART21]

Performance artist Istvan Kantor (Karl Lagerfeld lookalike?) vandalizes Jeff Koons retrospective with his own blood. This seems to be a pastime for him, seeing as he doused a Paul McCarthy sculpture in his blood in 2004. He won a Canadian award for that one. [Hyperallergic]

Gwangju Biennial president resigns after work criticizing South Korean president Park Geun-hye was censored by the local government. [The Art Newspaper]

Artforum likes Bunny Rogers. The artist just got a critic’s pick. She did a “Top Ten” for them this year. [h/t @mfortki, Artforum]

Chicagoans who like biking, jogging, or lollygagging around Lake Shore Drive will now be able to set their eyes upon a Christopher Wool sculpture. Lake Michigan just wasn’t enough of a view! [Chicago Tribune]

#Abramopug enjoys continued popularity, though so far, seems to have only one performance, “The Artist is Present,” in its repertoire. It’s going to have to do better than that if it wants to make it in this town. [Dazed Digital]

A man walks into Atlanta’s High Museum of Art with a gun. He’s told that’s “NOT OKAY” (in different words, of course) and security detains him. Mr. Guy With a Gun is confused because he didn’t know he was breaking the law—because the museum didn’t have proper signage telling him not to bring in his gun. This, just two months after Georgia passed a “guns everywhere” law. [NBC Atlanta via @Juliahalperin]

We missed this last month, but a Forbes writer has suggested closing all the libraries and buying everyone an Amazon Kindle subscription. Because a library is basically an inefficient storage warehouse. [Forbes]

Here’s a solid piece of criticism. I didn’t care what the New York Times’s “Bookends” column was doing ‘til now, but Jesus, these prompts are terrible, and they’re a total product of the newsy Internet opinion factory. Free the writers! [Salon]

The cheapest apartment in Manhattan below 96th Street will cost you $170,000. Looking at the dealer’s images, seems like this linoleum-filled studio needs some handiwork. [Curbed New York]

An unexpected creative tip from ad agencies: make something so bad that it’s good again. That was the very intentional premise behind making this Missouri Mall back-to-school ad, as well as this car dealership rap. The former went instantly viral. When it works it works, I guess. [Time]

An interview with NFL player David Bass, who comes from Ferguson, has powerful background on what it’s like to be black in Ferguson and deal with the police. “When I go home I get pulled over just because…When they don’t know who you are, all you are is black.” [MMQB]

In the New York Times, harrowing accounts of Michael Brown’s shooting: “Another neighbor, a woman who identified herself as a nurse, was begging the officers to let her perform CPR [on Brown]. They refused, Mr. Stone said, adding, “They didn’t even check to see if he was breathing.” [New York Times]

According to reports prepared for The New York Times by Tutela Capital S.A., and Beautiful Asset Advisors, flipping art like stock is no more common now than it was 20 years ago. So why do so many believe flipping is on the rise? The New York Times reports that increased art sales have affected our perception of the practice. Flipping is still the exception, not the rule. [The New York Times]

Julian Assange has made vague plans to leave Ecuador embassy in London “soon.” This comes after two years of refuge. Assange didn’t specify any reasons, but did say his health has suffered. [BBC News]

For background on Assange, nothing beats this essay by Andrew O’Hagan, who was hired to ghost write Assange’s biography. That project was never completed, and the essay explains why, while giving readers what may be the closest look at Assange ever produced. [The London Book Review]

After all-night talks, the Metropolitan Opera and two of its largest unions reached a tentative deal, preventing a lockout. [The New York Times]

The Goldring arts journalism program at Syracuse University is looking to hire a director to replace current director Johanna Keller. This program has a history of producing successful journalists. We hope it continues to be in good hands. [Arts Journal]

“Sparkle on bitches”. So begins the documentation of Christian Grattan’s portable coloring book station in Chelsea. Want the coloring book you see in that video for free? All you gotta do is give Artist Christian Grattan your name and address and he’ll send you one. His coloring book includes figures such as Andy Warhol, Karl Lagerfield, and Oprah. These are his heroes. [Sparkle Artist]

More people calling bullshit on Marina Abramovic. As if the fashion photo accompanying the piece picturing Marina holding a cup to her head weren’t enough evidence on its own. [The Guardian]

Anybody want to hear the story of a woman who helped make twenty two buildings permanently affordable in Manhattan? (Whitney did.) Makers of the documentary It Took 50…, the story of community land trusts in New York City, are speed-raising money on indiegogo to fund the rest of the film. Raise the money, or you’ll all be watching My Brooklyn from Philadelphia. [Indiegogo]

Rich artists in real estate: James Turrell is selling off his Gramercy Park pied-à-terre (ohhhh, fancy) in Gramercy Park for $2.85 million. Maybe he’ll be on track to finish Roden Crater with those funds? [Curbed NY]

Pittsburgh’s August Wilson Center for African American Culture could be turned into a hotel. After the center defaulted on its loans for the building, their bank proposed selling it to New York developer 980 Liberty. Here’s the background piece and here’s the opinion piece. [Pittsburgh Post-Gazette]

People have stolen 40 of Ryan McGinness’s abstract street signs, his public art project in partnership with the New York Department of Transportation. Chances are, a few of them will show up on eBay. [The Wall Street Journal]

New Yorkers have filed 7,031 complaints about the Mr. Softee jingle over the past four years. [The New York Post]

A whole bunch of shots from the Hermitage shouted out over Twitter. [@theBenStreet]

David Carr ruminates on the health of print media and concludes it’s on its death bed. He’s not sure anyone will even remember it. [The New York Times]

The basketball player formerly known as Ron Artest has decided to change his name to “Panda Friend” in honor of playing his next season in China. [ESPN]

When asked if Klaus_eBooks is a financially viable enterprise, its editor, Brian Droitcour, replies succinctly “No.” Their publisher, Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, must have loved that. Droitcour goes on to discuss censorship, and the thrust of the project: ephemerality of media. [Art in America]

Kate Beaton’s comics about working in the oil sands. So good. [Kate Beaton]

Do large New York City museums use the Internet to expand or to improve upon already existing exhibitions? Some institutions, like the Brooklyn Museum, are using the web to improve things on home fronts. But, big surprise: The Met sees the Internet as an opportunity to conquer the world. [The New York Times]

And on a slightly related note from the Onion: “Shitty Museum Doesn’t Even Have a Mona Lisa.” [The Onion]

Artist claims that Gilbert and George ripped off his work. He may have a point. Here’s Gilbert and George’s 2007 work, and here’s Atkinson’s from 1989. [artnet News]

Because it’s August and Friday and art news is slow, here’s some Star Wars trivia: Chewbacca’s voice came from recordings of four bears, a badger, a lion, a seal, and a walrus, all animals living in Long Beach. [The Atlantic]

In yesterday’s links we begged the world to stop this parody-music revival going on. Just to spite us, the universe has decided not to let up. Lonely Island is making a movie with Judd Apatow. Anything’s better than Weird Al Yankovic at the Super Bowl, I guess. [The Verge]

More than 900 writers under the name Authors United are signing an open letter admonishing Amazon for questionable practices. The claim: Amazon is discouraging readers from buying books from the publisher Hachette, as a way of pressuring it into giving better deals to Amazon on e-books. [Los Angeles Times]

Former President Nixon’s media legacy involves the continued presidential blackballing of it. [The Atlantic]

Social practice writers, artists, and historians: FIELD, the peer-review journal for you guys, has arrived. The first call for papers will remain open through October 15. Oh, and it’s run by Grant Kester and some other great people at UCSD. [Field Journal]

Nigeria still has a ways to go for its artists to compete in the global art market. Artists claim a poor level of service from dealers; dealers claim artists wrangle in backroom sales. [All Africa]

First rule of art school: Don’t act surprised when your teacher fails you for making art about shit. [Huffington Post]

Drones: Now delivering pizza. What else will we think of doing with our military technology? [GOOD]

Despite wars flaring up in the Middle East, ex-Mayor Bloomberg tells everyone to calm down. He’s taking an El Al flight to Tel Aviv, just to protest the FAA’s decision not to let U.S. flights in or out of the country. GOOD. LUCK. [New York Magazine]

After more attacks on Palestine, Nobel laureates, artists, and public intellectuals are calling for a military embargo. On the list are names like Alice Walker, Brian Eno, and Ismail Coovadia, the former South African ambassador to Israel. [Algérie Résistance]

The term “Normcore,” which started out as Brad Troemel’s tongue-in-cheek reference to DIS Magazine fodder (office casual, IKEA, Under Armour) now seems to have extended to plastic surgery. The “New New Face” is a surgical tactic to round out and normalize older women’s faces, and naturally, an artist is mining it. Amalia Ulman is getting plastic surgery to grow as close as possible to blandness.

The author voices the same problem I have with the jogging and have had all along with Normcore “détournement”: “I just wonder if capitalism is so inescapable that there is no radical alternative left to us other than performing it?” Again: an artist is chopping up her body, in order to comment on Normcore. [Bullet Magazine]

Reproductive rights advocates are turning to the states to get around the Supreme Court’s decision to allow religious companies like Hobby Lobby to drop birth control from its employees’ health care. [Slate]

Which artists are going to shake President Obama’s hand this year? The National Medal of Arts award nominees are out and the only visual artist on the list is James Turrell. The Brooklyn Academy of Music has also been nominated. The ceremony will happen this coming Monday, July 28. [NEA]

A petition to “Save the Corcoran” has successfully stalled the Corcoran Gallery of Art’s merger. Due to financial problems, the Corcoran Gallery of Art plans to cede control of its collection to the National Gallery and operate the College of Art and Design under George Washington University. [The Art Newspaper]

Baynard Woods, editor for Baltimore’s City Paper tries, however unsuccessfully, to get Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake to talk about her views on art. “Of course I like art, I went to goddamn Oberlin,” she told Woods.[City Paper]

Seems like the polls were right. Detroit pensioners vote to back the Grand Bargain, which is a huge step forward in the city’s effort to protect the DIA’s collection. [Detroit Free Press]

Day two in stories about giant amphibious art in China: Yesterday in Guiyang City a giant inflatable duck disappeared. Today, Chinese censors are banning Internet reports about a giant inflatable toad floating in Beijing Park. Why? Because people are comparing it to ex-President Jiang Zemin. [BBC News]

Plans for New York’s as-yet-to-be built Museum of African Art have been shelved for more modest ones. What would have been a $135 million project has now been cut by $40 million. It seems that younger institutions, though they may want to fight for the right to make mega-million-dollar institutions (like Whitney, MoMA, Lincoln Center) just don’t have the backing. [The New York Times]

Not art-related, but terrifying: Newsweek has a cover profile on Vladimir Putin and his life of “an endless procession of gilded rooms.” He does not like or understand the Internet. He’s referred to by his inner circle as the “Tsar.” He loves dogs. He is emotionless. He views ceding power as the greatest criminal act. [Newsweek]

In case you didn’t see this last week, here’s a list of the softest net artists. [Vice]

Why is painting today so flippant? According to art historian Lane Relyea, it’s because artists just don’t have any darn time: “[T]he social identity of the painter can be salvaged and recuperated for today: by reconceiving it as the painter who always goes to parties, curates shows, writes a blog. Somebody who’s like, wow, when does he ever have time to make those paintings? And the paintings look like it. They’re small, they’re more sketchlike in a way….” [Painter’s Table via Bad at Sports]

A two-ton rubber duck sculpture by Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman was washed away by torrential rainfall in China’s southwestern Guiyang City. A local radio station to the city’s public: “If you live by the river and see an 18 meter tall big yellow duck please call.” [The Guardian]

Evil building developers keep on being evil. Extell Development Company is building a high-rise at 40 Riverside Boulevard, and as part of the deal, some of the units needed to be reserved for affordable housing. In order for the rich folks to not be seen with the have-nots, they will have a separate entrance into the building. Get back from your Italian vacation, De Blasio! [Gawker]

We know that summer is slow for news and all, but Time Out New York has decided to go the celebrity route to round up readers: Susan Sarandon will take on the role of editor-in-chief for their August issue. [Time Out New York]

The Metropolitan Museum of Art will host a naturalization ceremony for new U.S. citizens. Those participants will include the Met’s director, the Brit Thomas P. Campell. [City Room]

In the latest from Richard Prince’s bizarre Twitter output, he tweets a photo of a girl bending over and looking at one of his paintings. This isn’t edgy social media art by any stretch of the imagination. It just seems like sexism (or some parody thereof). [Twitter]

While plans have been set in place to dissolve the Corcoran Gallery of Art, opponents have just moved forward (again) in their attempts to keep the Corcoran alive. [New York Times]

Retired Detroit workers vote to lower their expected pension benefits, thus reducing the city’s debt. Had the workers voted the other way, the pledges involved in the Grand Bargain would have vanished. Seems like Detroit is one step closer to protecting it’s collection at the DIA. [The New York Times]

Artists who love horses and live around Oakland, here’s an open call you may have missed: the 6th annual It’s All About the Horse exhibition. Just send in a JPEG of your horsey work by August 1. Who knows, you might win a ribbon (winners do actually receive ribbons). [Oakland Press]

“Clown of the Party” from POBA, the internet artist graveyard. (Pete Ham)

“The glittering chains of galaxies are no more substantial, no more reliable guides to physical reality, than greasepaint on the face of a clown.” A New York Times video on dark matter shows the visible universe to be only five percent of the larger universe, which scientists are only now beginning to plot. This invisible universe, which is defined by dark matter, is the scaffolding for the galaxies we see today. [The New York Times]

Art critic Barbara Rose has been buddies with artist Carl Andre since the 1950s; that camaraderie shows through in her Brooklyn Rail review of Andre’s retrospective at DIA. It might go down in history as the most glowing review ever written about the artist. (Of course, no mention of Ana Mendieta.) [The Brooklyn Rail]

Paddy Johnson profiles digital artist Nicolas Sassoon. Sassoon is currently completing an online residency for Opening Times, a non-profit that supports online artists based in London, and has been working on creating browser-sized GIFs. [Artnet]

This might be a scam: a site was launched yesterday that provides, at an annual rate of $49.95, immortality (at least on the Internet). POBA: Where the Arts Live, an online platform that asks grieving families, estate managers, or anybody who owns the rights to any artist’s legacy, to post the work of the deceased artist. It’s meant to be a site of commemoration, but really it just feels like an Internet graveyard. Creepy. [Hyperallergic]

Recommended Tonight: Collector’s Night at the Brooklyn Historical Society. You can see a woman’s collection of cockroach legs left in her apartment by her cat, all the clocks featured in the movie “Back to the Future,” and a stockpile of old bike seats. There will be piles of pins, dipsticks from automobiles, and objects found in cemeteries such as a dead bird, letters that have fallen off tombstones, and feathers. Also, 600 disco shirts, 300 neckties, and 90 pairs of shoes. In short: Go to this. [The New York Times]

The Whitney is putting on an event for teens during the Jeff Koons retrospective. AFC office response: “High school students can deal with cum on the face.” [The Whitney]

A public art space in London called The Wall, is being torn down. Why? Because the Residents Association see the current and inaugural work being shown, Stefan Bruggemann’s Text Pieces, to be an advertisement, not art. The Residents Association even struck an unnecessarily aggressive tone: “we want this amateur daub’s wish fulfilled in that it should be recognised when it is destroyed, as one of the mindless texts suggests.” Sign the petition to keep The Wall alive here. [Frieze Magazine via. Twitter]

Who’s behind the Artist Pension Trust, a royalties-based art sales firm? Moti Shniberg, a tech startup investor responsible for selling facial recognition technology to Facebook, and attempting to trademark the term “Sept. 11, 2001.” The latter, you can imagine, was a failed attempt. [Bloomberg]

Sixty-year-old artist Stephen Turner, who’s been living in a floating wooden egg for the past year, has “hatched.” The images of this are less disturbing than one might anticipate. [BBC News]

Kate Taylor wrote a piece for The Globe and Mail about the history and recent influx of visitors to wax museums like Madame Tussauds. Apparently, so many people were taking pictures with and touching the Justin Bieber figure at the New York branch that it had to be removed; the figure’s clothes were falling off and the staff could not keep it intact. [The Globe and Mail]

The Daily Mail made up a story about George Clooney’s mother-in-law, claiming violent religious differences where there were none. Clooney responds. [USA Today]

Pacific Standard’s Casey N. Cep discusses how the new “time-lapse” feature on Apple’s iPhone, will be the end of the selfie era, since “portraiture doesn’t lend itself to time-lapse unless the interval is seasons instead of seconds.” This is a pretty bold prediction that probably won’t come into fruition; Youtube is filled with videos of time-lapse portraiture taking place over short time intervals, like this one of a homeless veteran that has over 18 million views. [Pacific Standard]

The Queens Museum announces their QM-Jerome Foundation Fellowship program which will award 3 grants of $20,000 each to a New York based emerging artist. Artists must have lived in NYC for a year to be eligible and be at the “dawn” of their career. They can’t be in school or have had a solo show yet. [Queens Museum]

The New York Times gives a thorough account of how Hobart and Williams Smith Colleges mishandled a case of rape. A revealed in May by the Department of Justice, 55 universities are currently being investigated for improperly handling sexual assaults. [New York Times]

Dependably thorough reportage from Adrianne Jeffries and Russell Brandom on Airbnb’s campaign to rally people behind its legitimization efforts. The company wants to change a 2010 state law prohibiting city dwellers from renting out their entire apartments for less than 29 days, and it wants to figure out how to pay taxes. [The Verge]

Don’t forget to stop by Sarah Sze’s Venice Biennale Pavilion “Triple Point”, which is now at the Bronx Museum. It’s only up for about a month, which is insane. [Facebook]

Southern Australia has a forever-drought, called climate change, a new study shows. [Motherboard]

Turns out many New York condos are being bought by foreigners looking for ways to park their money without much scrutiny. They don’t live in the condos, and there are concerns that the apartments are simply being used as a means of laundering money. [New York Magazine]

Christian Viveros-Faune gives Tom Friedman at Lurhing Augustine in Bushwick a glowing review. He explains that he was initially dismissive, but now he realizes that Tom Friedman was pointing out the small print in what we should see. “It’s not often that a top-notch artist tries to pass off a series of brilliantly executed, insanely exacting, mind-and-eye-bending sculptures as a show of run-of-the-mill canvases done in house paint.” CVF writes of Friedman’s styrofoam-carved masterpiece knock-offs and other illusory works. Kudos to CVF for making these paintings seem like some kind of feat but I’m ready for us all to quit being awed by the magic of reproduction. We’re talking about Van Gogh replicas in pantone flavor. [Artnet News]

An incredible piece written by novelist and former professional athlete Benjamin Markovits about interviewing basketball star LeBron James in Barcelona and the crazy Nike PR reps who followed him. [Deadspin]

London based artist Catherine Yass is throwing a piano off of a high rise. This is all in the name of exploring how “sound works,” but really, it’s always fun to test how gravity works on large objects. Locals are not as fond of the idea, however. [Time Out London]

ARTINFO’s Instagrams of the Art World feature is pretty good this week. Faves include a pic of New Museum curators Gary Carrion-Murayari and Massimiliano Gioni wearing and doing exactly the same thing and a shot of Guggenheim’s digital marketing manager JiaJia Fei (vajiajia) jumping on a Daniel Buren sculpture at Storm King. [In the Air]

The Theo Westenberger Estate has opened their summer photo contest. The theme of this contest is feminist vision, revision and revolution. $5000 to winner. Extra points if you like them on Facebook. [Theo Westenberger Estate]

The ISIS has posted videos to Youtube and images to Twitter of members destroying landmarks, historical sites, and works of mostly Shia religious art. [Artnet]

Ben Austen for The New York Times Magazine on Detroit: “Property costs have dropped to the point that barriers to ownership — to a sort of mogulhood, even — are absurdly low.” [The New York Times Magazine]

The annual Artnews list of 200 big deal collectors is up. Who’s been added to this list? Who’s been dropped? Ah, who are we kidding; no one’s going to parse this list. [Artnews]

Zack “Danger” Brown has raised $46,000 in his kickstarter campaign to eat a bowl of potato salad, surpassing his initial goal of $10. Currently there are 5705 backers, 359 of which are “Platinum level,” wherein members are invited to Brown’s house to watch him make and then eat the salad. One platinum level donor told Huffington Post “This [is] the Woodstock of our generation.” [The Huffington Post]